Cosmology reading list

 

COSMOLOGY READING LIST

 

Sky and Space magazine (Australia): www.skyandspace.com.au

 

Argyros, A. J. (2007?) A Blessed Rage for Order. 149 Arg/Brf

 

Harrison, E. (2003) Masks of the Universe: changing ideas on the nature of the cosmos.

Brings together fundamental scientific, philosophical, and religious issues in cosmology, raising thought provoking questions. In every age people have pitied the universes of their ancestors, convinced that they have at last discovered the full truth.

 

Hoyle, F., Burbidge, G. & Narlikar, J. V. (2005) A Different Approach to Cosmology.

 

Lachieze-Rey, M. & Jean-Pierre Luminet, J-P. (2001) Celestial Treasury.

A truly beautiful book revealing the richness of astronomical theories and illustrations in Western civilisation through the ages, exploring their evolution, and comparing ancient and modern.

 

Laughlin, R. B. (2007?) A Different Universe: reinventing physics from the bottom down. Basic Books. ISBN 0465038298

 

Lindley, D. (2007?) Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the struggle for the soul of science. Doubleday. ISBN 9780385515061

 

Lidsey, J. E. (2002) The Bigger Bang.

Introduces some of the biggest cosmic concepts -- the Big Bang, cosmic inflation, superstrings, parallel universes, and the ultimate fate of the cosmos.

 

Longair, M. (2006) The Cosmic Century.

Reviews the historical development of the key areas of modern astrophysics and links the strands together to show how they have led to the extraordinarily rich panorama of modern astrophysics and cosmology.

 

Pecker, J. C. & J. Narlikar, J. (eds) (2006) Current Issues in Cosmology.

Many of the world's leading players in cosmology look at the strengths and weaknesses of the current big bang model in explaining certain puzzling data. A comprehensive coverage of the expanding field of cosmology, this text will be valuable for graduate students and researchers in cosmology and theoretical astrophysics.

 

Silk, J. (2005) On the Shores of the Unknown.

See how cosmologists study cosmic fossils from the distant past to construct theories of the birth, evolution and future of the Universe. Stars, galaxies and dark matter are described.

 

 

Professor John North

Professor John North, who died on October 31 aged 74, published works covering the whole history of Man's fascination with the universe, from the building of the Neolithic long barrows to the theory of black holes, and he brought to his work not only a clarity of expression but also a mathematician's precision.

 

When he published The Ambassadors' Secret (2002), in which he demonstrated astronomical and religious patterns underlying Hans Holbein's portrait of the French Ambassadors, one reviewer likened him to those who claim that "Elvis is Alive". Yet North's analysis of the picture, while controversial, was also, for many, persuasive – and it was typical of his rigorously scientific approach.

First, he pinpointed the time and date captured in the painting from a cylindrical sundial in the picture as being April 11 1533 – Good Friday – and the time as 4pm, when Christ is supposed to have died. Turning to the distorted skull in the foreground, which can be properly viewed only from a point on the right-hand side, North found that from this point a line could be drawn upwards to the eye of Christ on a tiny crucifix barely visible in the top left corner, passing through key points in the picture including the "27" mark on a quadrant. Both the skull and crucifix lines, he found, were at 27 degrees to the horizontal, a number repeated throughout the painting. Twenty-seven degrees would have been the angle of the sun above London at 4pm on Good Friday in 1533. North also found the distinctive shape of a medieval horoscope frame, its edges defined by key points in the picture. He had discovered a similar pattern in a horoscope he had plotted from one of the Canterbury Tales, which he dated to Good Friday 1400. It later emerged that Holbein had finished the title page illustration for the first English edition of Chaucer's stories only the year before he painted The Ambassadors, possibly deriving inspiration from it.

His doctorate was published as The Measure of the Universe: A History of Modern Cosmology (1965). It was praised as "a virtually complete history of modern mathematical cosmological theories" and was reprinted as a paperback in 1990.

 

North's interest in the paraphernalia of medieval astronomy and astrology – astrolabes, almanacs, clocks, calendars and so forth – resulted in a monumental three-volume study of Richard of Wallingford (1976), a 13th-century abbot of St Albans who was also an astronomer and mathematician. North edited, translated and commented upon all the abbot's surviving works, including the oldest surviving description of a mechanical clock, which he found in the Bodleian Library. In God's Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time (2004), North made the case for the English origins of the clock - one of the great turning points in the history of the last 1,000 years.

 

In the late 1960s North published a series of articles on Chaucer, later summarised in Chaucer's Universe (1988), a 564-page survey in which he showed that the poet employed astronomical techniques and used astrological almanacs for structuring his plots, some of which (The Knight's Tale, for example), have parallels with cosmic events. In the preface to the book North admitted that he risked "being bracketed with those who try to prove that Bacon wrote Shakespeare", but the thoroughness of his scholarship was undeniable. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement described the book as "one of the century's monuments of scholarship".

 

In 1977 North accepted the chair in the History of Science and Philosophy at Groningen University in the Netherlands, where he rose to be dean of the faculty from 1990 to 1993. Excavations of a Bronze Age burial mound close to his home alerted him to the cosmology of pre-historic cultures. The result was Stonehenge: Neolithic man and the Cosmos (1996), a thorough survey of Neolithic structures in northern Europe, backed up by copious mathematical and astronomical data, in which he suggested that long barrows were used as horizons to view rising and setting stars, and that the configuration of the stones at Stonehenge was to make possible the observation of the setting of the midwinter sun rather than its midsummer rising, as had previously been assumed. This theory, if correct, would suggest that Neolithic man had developed an understanding of fundamental geometrical concepts that we generally associate with Pre-Socratic Greece.

 

North's other works included Horoscopes and History (1986), The Fontana History of Astronomy and Cosmology (1994), an erudite tour de force accessible to the general reader and the expert alike; and the monumental Cosmos, published earlier this year (2008), a 900-page survey of Man's fascination with the stars from prehistoric times to the present.